The Public Service: State of Transformation conference is hosted by the Public Service Transformation Academy, and will bring together over 200 thought leaders and practitioners working on public service transformation to help each other understand what works and doesn’t work in achieving better outcomes for citizens from public service design and delivery.
The conference will explore a number of core themes including collaborative leadership, co-production with citizens and communities, asset-based commissioning, creating a change-making culture, systems leadership across place, organisational restructure supporting change, creating meaningful social value, impact of Brexit on public service delivery, and public sector leadership resilience.
The GO Lab will host three break-out sessions at this year's conference. For the sessions, we will be joined by leading government policymakers and commissioners, innovative service delivery organisations and outstanding academics, who will share with the audience their insights into how and when a focus on outcomes and cross-sector collaboration can lead to better social impact. Each session will allow for ample time for questions from the audience and we expect a very lively conversation with the participants.
Ten years on since the world’s first social impact bond project was announced at HMP Peterborough, social impact bonds (SIBs) continue to divide opinion. There are now 68 such projects in the UK alone, and hundreds in operation or under developed across the world. But what have we learnt over the past decade, how has the world of impact bonds evolved and where are we going next?
In this session, we will take stock of what the emerging evidence can tell us about the impact of this model and will discuss with local government leaders how they are seeking to use SIBs as a tool for system-wide transformation in their communities.
Terry Clark, Head of Outcomes Commissioning, London Borough of Sutton
With collaboration between communities and local government high on the public service reform agenda, the GO Lab set out to investigate in its latest research the emerging practice of sharing responsibility between public sector authorities and their partners in communities. The research focuses on the collaborations and partnerships that are forming between local public sector authorities, the voluntary sector, businesses and local people, and identifies a series of case studies that point to some of the pre-requisites for successful collaboration and some common challenges. Find out more about the Rallying Together project.
This session will share insights from the research and explore with participants how they can apply this learning to their own challenges and what their own experience of building meaningful collaborations in their communities is.
Jo Blundell, Advisor, Government Outcomes Lab
Franziska Rosenbach, Research Assistant, Government Outcomes Lab
In the aftermath of the Carillion collapse and other major outsourcing failures, local government outsourcing fell by more than £80m in 2018, according to the Arvato UK Outsourcing Index. What are the factors that influence how public authorities make contracting decisions? And what are some of the tools and frameworks that might enable more effective decision-making around whether to make or to buy in the public sector?
This session will bring together practitioner and academic insights for a thought-provoking discussion around the strategic considerations that influence the ‘make or buy’ decision and future of outsourcing in the public sector.
Mara Airoldi, Director, Government Outcomes Lab